NIGERIA TO HOST 90% OF EXTREMELY POOR BY 2030, SAYS WORLD BANK

The World Bank has predicted that by 2030, about nine out of 10 extremely poor people in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa, which includes Nigeria and others.The Bretton Woods institution, which gave its forecast in its report named Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018, affirmed that the forecast for 2018 suggested that Nigeria would take over from India as the country with the poorest people.According to the report, the rate of extreme poverty and the number of poor in South Asia, which has been constantly declining, would continue, resulting in a shift in poverty from South Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa.“In a sign of change, however, forecasts for 2018 suggest that India’s status as the country with the most poor is ending; Nigeria either already is, or soon will be, the country with the most poor people.“By 2030, the portion of the poor living in Sub-Saharan Africa could be as large as 87 percent on the basis of historical growth rates,” the new report noted.The World Bank in this report themed: “Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle,” stated that, even if every other country in the world had zero extreme poverty by 2030, the average rate in Sub-Saharan Africa would have to decrease from the 2015 rate of 41 percent to about 17 percent for the global average to be 3 percent.The World Bank lamented that, the huge progress against poverty in other regions contrasted sharply with the much slower pace of poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. It explained that extreme poverty is becoming more concentrated there because of the region’s slower rates of growth, problems caused by conflict and weak institutions, and a lack of success in channeling growth into poverty reduction.The number of people living in poverty in the region has grown from an estimated 278 million in 1990 to 413 million in 2015. Whereas the average poverty rate for other regions was below 13 percent as of 2015, it stood at about 41 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the world’s 28 poorest countries, 27 are in sub-Saharan Africa, all with poverty rates above 30 percent. In short, extreme poverty is increasingly becoming a sub-Saharan African problem,” the report noted.“African countries have struggled partly because of their high reliance on extractive industries that have weaker ties to the incomes of the poor, the prevalence of conflict, and their vulnerability to natural disasters such as droughts.Despite faster growth in some African economies, such as Burkina Faso and Rwanda, the region has also struggled to improve shared prosperity.